Led by Pence and architect of nationwide voter suppression program, Kris Kobach

In all the excitement following his dismissal of FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump chose to sign an executive order on Thursday creating an ‘election integrity’ commission tasked with reviewing allegedly widespread voter fraud in the American electoral system.

The commission will review policies and practices that enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of federal elections and provide the president with a report that identifies system vulnerabilities that lead to improper registrations and voting.

The “Presidential Commission on Election Integrity” will be led Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who will serve as Chair and Vice Chair of the purportedly bipartisan commission.

Sounds like the President may have actually gotten one of these executive orders right, for a change, doesn’t it? After all, who doesn’t want fair, free and honest elections? Except, according to numerous non-partisan studies over the years, including a recent ABC News fact-check in January, most states insist that voter fraud is “very” or “extremely” rare despite GOP claims of rampant voter fraud to the contrary.

For example, in three of the nation’s four most populated states (California, New York and Florida), election officials say they found zero cases of voter fraud this past election, notes ABC News.

More importantly, the appointment of Kansas Secretary of State, and Trump adviser, Kris Kobach, to the commission casts serious doubt on the intent and the integrity of its mission. Kobach is a well-known “crusader” against voter fraud and the primary promoter of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program—arguably the largest and most coordinated GOP voter suppression effort since Jim Crow—a program that has led to the unwarranted and unsupervised removal of hundreds of thousands of voters (specifically African-American and likely Democratic voters) from voter rolls nationwide since its inception in 2005.

Republican election officials across the nation have been using Crosscheck, with great success, to suppress Democratic turnout, especially since the 2010 midterms.

In the wake of Trump’s “upset victory,” and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, relatively little has been said about the millions of Americans who were eligible but unable to vote in 2016 because they faced an overwhelming assortment of newly-enacted voter ID requirements or were simply dropped from the rolls by GOP lawmakers in key swing states using the Crosscheck program.

Clinton lost the vote in several battleground states by less than one percent, including in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Florida — states where Clinton was predicted to win based on months of polling averages. What the polls could not, and did not, predict was voter suppression enacted and enforced by GOP state legislatures, secretaries of state and governors on such a daring scale.